December 3, 2013
Tuesday

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
— A. A. Milne, 1882-1956
English author

It’s been two years since I did much beyond an Advent wreath and the crèche to bring physical expression to the spirit of Christmas in the house. This year will be different, I’ve said, and I’ve made some progress. I put the Advent wreath in place on Sunday (on time). The crèche followed today. The tree is erected and lighted, but not decorated yet. This afternoon I went about putting out some of the things that were part of the cookie table decorations when I had my Holiday Open House Extravaganza. I was looking for the picture of my mother laughing (seen in “The Demon Baker,” a Holidailies piece from 2004) that I put beside the three cookies that were her specialty. It’s somewhere, I know, probably in a drawer of the desk that becomes the cookie table. So I opened it, and put my hands on this:

I can’t say I haven’t seen this picture before. The family pictures have been in my possession since my mother shipped them up from Florida when my father died in 1985. The material she wished to save from their life there she had shipped to my sister. Since I see myself as the family historian, I blithely took possession of the two or three boxes of archival material. In the twenty-eight years since that day, the stuff has been categorized, although somewhat casually, and distributed among some other acid- and lignin-free archivally safe boxes. One box has a list of contents, and there is even the beginnings of a family album. Most of the project, however, remains to be done.

The picture is dated March 21, 1947. I am 13 days old. My mother is one month past her 36th birthday. She is sitting in the bedroom of the house I lived in until I was seven years old. I remember the wallpaper.

I cannot tell you why this picture was lying loose in a drawer, along with our supply of blank checks and two rosaries (in cases) that belonged to Ron’s mother. And though I know that I have seen it many times — certainly I was the one who handled it and placed it there — I at first thought it was a picture of my mother and my infant sister. Until I turned it over. And I swear by all that is good and holy in my life, I swear on the souls of my grandchildren who have yet to be born, that until four o’clock this afternoon, I had never read the notation on the back:

My mother has written a note to her sister. “Dear Mary – Baby is much bigger than this now – weighs almost 8 lbs., and has more hair. She’s awful sweet & is just now waking up. Love Rose.”

The historian in me immediately composed a description of the piece. It is written in black ink, now faded, from a Parker piston-fill fountain pen that had belonged to my grandfather, and that I still have. The handwriting is typical of my mother’s cursive, although it seems less formal and produced more haphazardly than was usual for her. The picture was taken with a Kodak Brownie camera that had been a baby gift from the senior class at Marysville High School, where my father taught. (The president of that class came to my father’s funeral.) That my mother retained possession of the picture suggests she never sent it, either because following through was something she couldn’t manage to address, or because she liked the picture too much to part with it.

The daughter in me, who this morning began an essay in response to a call entitled “Every Mother Has a Story” that will be about my tenth grade English teacher, who was a Sister of Mercy and thus not a mother herself but who encouraged my work and my earliest efforts to develop as a writer in ways that my mother could not, neither then nor later, that daughter in me, who often fails to follow through with good intentions, held the picture, read the words, and burst into tears.